universidad santo tomas

NEW TAMPA Tennis rackets were as popular as shopping carts outside the Walmart at Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and Regents Park Drive June 2.

The USTA has teamed up with the discount retailer to take SmashZone, an interactive fan experience held annually during the U.S. Open tennis championship in New York City, on a 16-city tour throughout the state.

The U.S. Tennis Association brought the SmashZone mobile tour to the supercenter at 19910 Bruce B. Downs Blvd. for the first local stop.

Its purpose was to introduce tennis to a new generation of potential players and serve as an encouragement to children to lead healthy lifestyles through sports and fitness.

"It's definitely a factor to help bring more kids to the game," USTA communications coordinator Trina Singian said of the mobile tour visit.

The SmashZone mobile unit is equipped with a portable tennis court, interactive games, prizes and information about local tennis programs. It is a complement to the USTA's ongoing youth initiative known as 10 and Under Tennis.

An event such as SmashZone is designed to get tennis rackets in the hands of youth of all ages and abilities.

The USTA, the national governing body for the sport of tennis, aims to reignite interest in an international sport once dominated by Americans, including many professional players who lived in New Tampa and trained at the famed Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel.

No American tennis player is currently ranked in the Top 10 men's or women's world rankings.

CollegeHumor Video roasts Facebook

When comedy Web site College Humor decided to roast Facebook, it couldn’t help itself from picking on the much easier target, too: MySpace.

In a three and a half minute animated cartoon that features every online behemoth site and every online wannabe, the comedians doing most of the bashing are Google, Twitter, and Foursquare. Audience members like YouTube, Linkedin, and Flickr giggle at the jokes that are meant to point out the failings of Facebook but more often than not go back to how lame MySpace has become.

Pandora Radio, fittingly, is responsible for doing the punchline drumroll “ba-dum-bum-CHING.”

Google, voiced by Penn Jillette of eccentric magician act Penn & Teller, kicks off the roast by making fun of Facebook’s extensive privacy settings:

“Facebook collects so much information he’s going to be on an episode of Hoarders! He stacks up ad keywords like they’re back issues of National Geographic!”

Twitter is surprisingly voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, known for his trademark loud and grating voice. (Remember the parrot Iago in Aladdin and Aflac duck?) Somehow, I always thought Twitter would sound much nicer.

When Twitter takes over the mike, he continues the merciless mocking of Myspace, saying someone should call a janitor to clean up the vomit from a 13 year-old girl — oh sorry, that’s just Myspace.

But Twitter doesn’t let his nemesis Facebook off the hook either, saying he knew “The Social Network” was a lie “because it made Mark Zuckerberg interesting. The Terms of Service could be more a dynamic leader!”

When Foursquare, voiced by Lisa Lampanelli (known as “Comedy’s Lovable Queen of Mean”) gets on stage, she plays on how much hipper Foursquare is than the hasn’t-been-cool-for-years MySpace.

“The only thing more popular than [Facebook’s] like button is the Myspace’s delete account button,” Foursquare jabs. “Thank god for failed musicians!”

The audience is starting to feel pretty bad for Myspace at this point, which is not too different than reality. And then Myspace makes it worse by getting on stage, where it makes a string of failed jokes about Facebook which is met with boos all around.

Finally, MySpace appeals for help from Friendster, who has got a bowtie on and is holding cocktail glases in the aisle. But even Friendster doesn’t want to be associated with MySpace: “Hey, hey, I’m just working tonight man.”

Ann Coulter Gets 'Demonic

Liberals eager to find offense with Ann Coulter’s latest book need only thumb over to page 4, where the blond provocateur lumps left-wing protestors in with the Maoist gangs looting villages and impaling babies in China.

Or they can simply read the title.

Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America is yet another pull-no-punches tract from the Right’s Queen of Mean.

She’s as divisive as ever, lobbing red meat to her base while driving the Left to fits of rage. It’s in her DNA. But her tabloid style distracts from a larger truth. Few can illuminate the chasm between Right and Left like Coulter. You just have to endure her baiting prose to see it.

Demonic feels as packed as her political columns, and often nearly as riotous. At nearly 300 pages long — not counting the bibliography and various appendixes — it’s hardly a rush job. It’s the breadth of her examples which will leave readers gasping. Thank goodness for her fiery sense of humor. It’s a mandatory release valve for the anger her prose is sure to inspire.

What conservative wouldn’t get red-faced over the Left’s tactics, what Coulter describes as an amalgam of hate, insincerity, and outright deception.

Coulter ties the Left in knots via her mob mentality description, based on the 1896 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon — who might as well get a co-author credit here.

“Democrats activate mobs, depend on mobs, coddle mobs, publicize and celebrate mobs — they are the mob,” she writes. And if that weren’t scabrous enough, she’s just getting started.

“The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes — as yet,” she writes.

It’s Coulter being Coulter, and if you’re offended it would probably make her day.

Coulter boils down support for ObamaCare via the “mob mentality” lens: “it will provide health care for 30 million uninsured Americans, everyone’s health care will improve — and their plan would save money! … Only the mob could believe it,” she writes.

In “The Historical Context of the Left,” Coulter fashions herself a politically incorrect professor out to label the Left as the heirs to the French Revolution, a topic previously explored in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

“Liberals don’t like to talk about the French Revolution because it’s the history of them,” she writes, before recalling the beheadings and other atrocities from the era.

It’s an imaginative, if incendiary, way to view the likes of MoveOn.org and the union thugs, but Coulter wastes far too much pulp on the matter. A Coulter book should be read in a few intoxicating sittings.

She later turns her attention to the American Revolution, delivered in her own inimitable style. The text does support tea partier Sarah Palin when it describes how Paul Revere warned the British they would be massacred if it they went near Lexington Green.

One tenuous connection between the two revolutions was Thomas Paine, who inexplicably supported the mob-like tactics practiced by the French.

“He was a historical one-hit wonder, desperately trying to find that follow-up single that would put him back on top,” she writes.